NY missive no 197 - From "Blink" to "PureGym"

Blink on Steinway as it was, plus double rainbow

Our local, low-cost gym was Blink, on Steinway Street. Their primary color was orange, and there was a cheery all-are-welcome vibe about the place. That was even set out explicitly in their slogans, “The gym for every body”, and “Mood above muscle”.

You would swipe in with a tag on your keychain at the front desk, where two employees were on hand to welcome customers and help out with anything that might come up. In the locker rooms of course the modus operandi was people plugged into their own content on their phones, going about their business while listening to music, or a podcast, or calling a friend.

But sometimes there’d be chit chat among the gym-goers. I remember getting into a discussion with two other women, one much older than me, one younger, about mountains or big hills we had either climbed, or would like to climb. I haven’t climbed many (despite that being on my “forty before forty” list), but I mentioned that, like one of them, my sister once climbed Kilimanjaro. Invariably in front of the changing room’s wide mirror someone would be posing in a conscious yet unselfconscious way for selfies, holding their camera up at this angle or that to get the best shot.

Blink was owned by Equinox - a “luxury fitness and health club” company. Equinox in turn was (is) owned by the real estate conglomerate Related Companies, which in turn is owned by billionaire and Trump pal Stephen Ross. All those layers didn’t really make their presence felt in the Blink on Steinway. Until things began to change. 

The first thing that happened was the name above the entrance. The bright lettering “Blink Fitness” was replaced with “PureGym” in teal green. Over a period of a few weeks, the cheesy signage inside ("I blink therefore I am", "Blink and be merry") switched to nondescript PureGym messaging and emergency cords marked with big red arrows went up on each wall.

Contractors came in and worked on an elaborate project in the entranceway, which turned out to be the installation of two of those revolving door containers that you get at airport security. Scan a QR code on your phone, enter a plastic tube and the door revolves shut behind you. Wait a few seconds praying that the thing works, then the other side opens up and releases you into the gym. Then the reception table was removed, along with the employees who used to stand behind it. 

Blink had gone bankrupt - the “mood above muscle” membership model hadn’t worked out for Equinox-Related-Ross. And PureGym bought them out. When I learned that PureGym is a UK company I thought, as an American Brit, ok, that’s kind of cool. But when I learned that PureGym is joint-owned by two private equity firms, Leonard Green & Partners and the giant KKR, I thought well that’s less cool. It explains why the gym now feels pretty much like an extraction machine, even if it is less crowded as the “bring a friend once a week for free” perk has gone and the equipment paired down a bit accordingly. Gone are the elements of fun and the presence of human staff, so that our weight-lifting tread-milling bodies generate healthy corporate returns. 

I still go a couple of times a week. One time I thought I’d make more of an effort to chat with other gym goers to compensate for the overall reduced humanity but my conversant’s politics riled me up (with her sweeping dismissal of all people who voted for Trump, aghhh), and I went back to listening to my music, watching the CNN headlines on the screens above my head, and bemoaning the increasing atomization of the world. 

PureGym’s motto is a rather cold and functional: “stronger than yesterday.”

NY missive no 196 - Deadheads, whip rounds and a rose called America

The "America" rose which has now died, and the surprise rose in front of it

The other evening I was vacuuming the living room after dinner and it reminded me of how Mum used to do what she called “whip rounds” with the vacuum, also in the evening. She would have said hoovering of course. She said that that little intervention each night made an outsized difference to how clean the house felt. I imagine there was also a dynamic whereby, tired from a long day at work, she wasn’t that good at unwinding on week nights. But I’m just realizing it now as I feel it myself, maybe there’s a hormonal shift at play too, a very practical shift, in that physically moving about helps rest an unquiet or disgruntled mind.

I’d love to be able to share these feelings with her as I get older. But the second best (by a long way) thing is having these spontaneous moments of understanding of her experience of aging in the past as I experience them myself in the present, bringing us closer.

I also remembered her today as I cut the browned flowers off a hydrangea shrub. The term she used for that was “dead-heading”. Which when you think about it is a pretty grim term. It feels ruthless chopping off the flowers - just recently a brilliant blue - at the point where the next pair of leaves is sprouting from the stem, but it’s a way to help the plant conserve its energy as Autumn approaches. 

Speaking of the garden, I had a feeling I was tempting fate when I bought a climbing rose plant called “America”. Once a year in Spring I go to Verni’s Garden Store on Astoria Boulevard: this year I was looking for a rose for the wall, and despite my reservations about the name this one drew my attention. Sure enough though, it has died. First one of its four young branches, then another, then another, as the leaves got black spot, turned yellow, and fell off with the lightest touch, despite my efforts at mulching and spraying with internet-recommended concoctions of water, vinegar and baking soda.

The amazing thing though is that a second, different rose must have come as a tiny sapling in the same pot so that I transferred it to the flower bed as well. And this rose is thriving, already sprouting four pink flowers this year. I could over-extend the analogy but it must be saying something about new life and ways of being that are emerging and will emerge.

NY missive no 195 - Party Pope, and Mamdani's campaign

 

Crowds start to gather in Astoria Park before the annual July 4 celebration (which is always one Thursday before actual July 4)

For some reason a story about the new Pope deciding that he would open up the Papal Summer residency Castel Gandolfo - which his predecessor Francis had declined as a luxury - struck a chord with me. “Not a sin to swim” was the headline. Among the darkness that seems to be permeating much of the world these days, he decided that respite and reflection are ok, that he can take a pause before the serious work ahead.

Then the next bit of news I see about him he’s organizing a "Jubilee of Youth" in Rome, attended by a million young Catholics. (I'm agnostic myself, but like many have followed news of the new papacy). There’s a strategic dimension to reaching out to youth of course - he's vested in the survival and growth of the church . But it also sends a message of what he sees as a priority - creating space for young people, space for hope to be nurtured. 

Pope Leo's complex lineage reflects an important story too. There’s a much-needed shift underway more generally which recognizes that while many groups have traditionally been - and continue to be - subjected to oppression -  individual identifies are often multifaceted, and becoming more and more multifaceted. Multiplicity has meaning as well as the narrower identities of which it is composed.

Multiplicity has been prominent in Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York City Mayor as well, which my goodness has brought a new sense of possibility to NYC politics. It has galvanized people in ways that don’t presume politics on the basis of narrowly-defined identities. It has inspired many first-time voters to register and vote, tapping into one overarching reality that resonates with the majority of New Yorkers - affordability, particularly of housing, transit, food and child care. 

People are questioning whether all the specific proposals behind the platform are achievable, but look at how any savvy politician broadens support to win (which you need to do before you can actually change anything). Trump's “build the wall”, for example. It’s how it works, and it is working. It’s a campaign that prioritizes listening over preaching, with an emphasis on connecting with people where they are at - check out this walk down the length of Manhattan just before primary night. And it also leans towards hope, hope that does not ignore the deep divisions and dark directions of the world but that does recognize the power of joy. 

NY missive 194 - The House of Rust

The southwest corner of Central Park, early on a Friday morning

On the N train from 30th Ave, after a couple of stops I put my phone back in my bag and resist its tug and take out The House of Rust.

I had found it in the Strand bookstore, when we took the kids during their Winter break. I was by the “B” fiction row, which due to idiosyncrasies of shelving is tucked away in a corner, a bit removed from most of the fiction. I was looking for James Baldwin books. C and I had seen the “Baldwin in Istanbul 1961 - 1971” photo exhibit at Brooklyn Library for my birthday, so he was on my mind - also because the timeless clear anger and love that permeates his prose and is so needed at the moment. I was debating which of his books to buy when I saw a book by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber - The House of Rust - nearby, and chose it instead.

It was one of those moments that said “this is the book for you now”, with undercurrents perhaps being that it is set in Mombassa - I am somewhat obsessed by cities by the sea - and that the blurbs on the back made it clear it is something special, but more so being those mysterious ways in which books find their way into our lives in timely ways.

Anyway. I start reading on the train. It’s a part in the middle of the book when the main protagonist Aisha has ventured out to sea in a boat made of bones in search of her missing fisherman father. Along the way she has encountered and battled strange sea monsters, and just as my subway rattles in the tunnel between the Lex/59th and 5th Avenue stops the most significant of these encounters comes to a head in the most breathtaking, wild and beautiful way.

I’ve been battling my own demons these past months that seemed to come to a head yesterday. And here is this amazingly determined and resilient girl in her boat out in the ocean and my hands tighten on the pages and I smile with respect and relief.

********* 

Once out of the train I walk up to JNH’s school for a monthly “coffee and donuts” gathering for parents. The theme of this one is teaching social studies “in these times”. JNH has followed his instincts for drama and film, and is now a drama studio freshman (almost at the end of the first year already!) at LaGuardia - a mighty change of scene from his small local middle school in Queens, but that’s a story for another day.

I walk up 6th Avenue to Central Park and cut through its bottom left (ok, southwest), corner. The weather’s a leaden gray which has an ominous tinge as I know this is the edge of a weather pattern that has ripped roofs off homes, and daycare centers, and megastores through the center of the country. 

I used to think tornadoes happen from time to time as grizzly one-offs, but no, this was a whole procession of them. Nature’s been getting more and more broken and mad at us, including here in the US where the year kicked off with rampant wildfires in Los Angeles. People get hit across the board but the building back is toughest for the poorest, and is physically done by the poorest, while insurance firms get wary of insuring anything that might dent their comfortable returns, and come up with creative mechanisms to avoid pay backs. 

For example, 2024 was the year with the third-biggest insured losses in over 40 years, the Economist reports. And yet “catastrophe bonds” that aim to protect issuers of insurance from major losses in natural disasters generated 20% and 18% in returns to their investors in 2023 and 2024 respectively, their strongest performance in recent decades. There are stringent criteria applied to when they have to pay out. When Hurricane Beryl caused devastation in Jamaica last year, a bond issued by the government and the World Bank did not pay out because the air pressure during the hurricane was conveniently just a touch higher than the level at which the bond would be paid out.

NY missive 193 - Here we are

Calling my pre-election post "fall" turns out to have been pretty apt. Either way that the result turned out would have been accompanied by a continued fraying: as it happens, the fraying has been accelerated.

There's now a sociopathic real estate guy back in the White House bringing his ruthless transactionalism to the global stage, with his most stakes-raising / obliterating move so far being to say that the US should take ownership of Gaza, whose people and their homes have been decimated with US support, and turn it into a "Riviera of the Middle East". Basically, an approach that involves ethnic cleansing to "clear" the way for luxury waterfront property development, into which his son-in-law's private equity firm - "Affinity Partners" - is salivating to invest. Proposals like these generate media and commentary which intentionally or not serve to legitimize them, making them a possibility through repetition and response, closing the space for alternatives, a banalization of horror. 

Meanwhile at his side stands the World's richest man who has brought in his "DOGE" team of young engineers to dismantle agencies. Greater efficiency and less bureaucracy and corruption would be great but that's not the intent here, instead it's deregulation, a convergence of land-grabs and tech-solutioneering that is accelerating capitalism's eat-itself, eat-us-all machine in darkly predictable ways. 

Within this crumbling World small interactions, smiles, gestures of kindness and humanity across boundaries small or big take on a new significance, they are a faintly beating heart that may suggest strength, or at least holding on, holding together, weaving a fabric of other possibilities that we have to be alert to, kindling them, gathering around them like fires providing warmth and light among ruins.